Weil alludes to necessity as "the mechanism which
governs matter" in Thoughts without order concerning the love
of God, in an essay entitled L'amour de Dieu et le malheur
(The Love of God and affliction).

This
universe we live in, of which we are a part, is this distance put by divine
Love between God and God. We are a point in this distance. Space, time and
the mechanism that governs matter are this distance. Everything we
call evil is nothing else but this mechanism.

For Weil, Gravity
is the paradigm for the mechanism of necessity, and Weil appears to assume
classical, Newtonian, laws of physics that completely determine natural
events. However, Weil goes on to claim that all of creation is subject to
similar deterministic laws, and she includes life, the history of peoples
and our very souls. In this light, our thoughts and actions are completely
and precisely determined by external causes, to think otherwise is illusion.
Weil's vision here is less of a clockmaker's universe, than a creation ruled
by natural law, where reason reigns supreme.

God has made it so that, when his grace penetrates to the very center
of a man and, from there, illuminates his entire being, this grace will
enable him to walk on water without violating the laws of nature. But
when a man turns away from God, he gives himself over to mere gravity.
Afterwards he believes he is willing and choosing, but he is only a thing,
a stone falling. If one looks closely, with a truly attentive gaze, at
souls and human societies, one sees that everywhere that the virtue of
supernatural light is absent, everything obeys mechanical laws that are
as blind and precise as the laws of falling bodies. This knowledge is
profitable and necessary. Those who we call criminals are only tiles torn
from a roof by the wind, falling randomly. Their only sin is the initial
choice that made them tiles.

The mechanism of
necessity, while remaining the same, transposes itself on all levels:
in brute matter, in plants, in animals, in peoples, in souls. Seen from
the point where we are, it is completely blind. But if we transpose our
heart outside ourselves, outside the universe, outside space and time, there
where our Father is, and if we look at this mechanism from there, it appears
completely different. That which seemed necessity becomes obedience.
Matter is complete passivity, and hence complete obedience to God's will.
It is a perfect model for us. There can be no other being than God and that
which obeys God. By its perfect obedience, matter deserves to be loved by
those who love its Master, just as a lover looks tenderly upon the needle
that was used by the dead woman he loved.

We are warned of
the share matter deserves of our love by the beauty of the world.
In the beauty of the world, brute necessity becomes the object of
love. Nothing is as beautiful as the fugitive folds of the waves on the
sea, or the almost eternal folds of mountain scapes.

The
sea is not less beautiful to our eye because we know that sometimes ships
sink in it. On the contrary, it is more beautiful still. If the sea modified
the movement of its waves to spare a boat, it would be a being possessing
discernment and choice, and not this fluid that is perfectly obedient to
all external pressures. It is this perfect obedience that is its beauty.

Man can
never escape obedience to God. A creature cannot not obey. The only choice
offered to man as an intelligent and free creature, is to desire obedience
or not to desire it. If he does not desire it, he perpetually obeys nevertheless,
as a thing subject to mechanical necessity. If he does desire obedience,
he remains subject to mechanical necessity, but a new necessity is added
on, a necessity constituted by the laws that are proper to supernatural
things. Certain actions become impossible for him, while others happen through
him, sometimes despite him.

And like
the oscillations of the waves, the succession of all events down here --
all of which are mutually compensated ruptures of equilibrium, births and
destructions, increases and decreases -- all render visible the invisible
presence of a network of insubstantial limits, harder than any diamond.
That is why the vicissitudes of things are beautiful, although they make
a merciless necessity appear. Merciless, but which is not force, but the
sovereign mistress of any force.

The operation
of intelligence in scientific study makes sovereign necessity over matter
appear to thought as a network of immaterial relations, without force. Necessity
can only be perfectly conceived when the relations appear as perfectly immaterial.
They are then present to the mind only by the effect of elevated and pure
attention, which issues forth from a point in
the soul which is not submitted to force.

The forces
down here are sovereignly determined by necessity; necessity is constituted
by relations which are thoughts; it follows that the force
which is sovereign down here is sovereignly determined by thought. Man is
a thinking creature; he is on the side of that which commands force.

As long
as man tolerates having his soul full of his own thoughts, of his personal
thoughts, he is entirely submitted -- even in his most intimate thoughts
-- to the constraint of needs and the mechanical play of force. If he believes
otherwise, he is in error. But everything changes when, by virtue of real
attention, he empties his soul to let the thoughts
of eternal wisdom pass through it. He then carries in himself the very thoughts
to which force is submitted.